Contents

Proposal

An attempt to describe possible tagging for mapping unofficial (i.e. illegal in most places) and semi-official (i.e. "gray legal area") street art objects. Since street art in general is unstable and can appear or disappear in relatively short periods of time, I suggest mapping only large street art of a more permanent nature, interesing for general audience to see and useful for navigation.

Rationale

As it is already mentioned above, street art is generally changing over time, most works don't live long. However there are always more "stable" and large artworks occupying whole fences, walls of a building or even whole buildings.
Street art is rarely mentioned in discussions (this may be one example). Yet sometimes it is quite useful for navigation, especially when it is easily seen and can be quickly recognized.
There exist several art festivals and parties involving creating art objects in different parts of the city (example). Most of these objects are more-or-less permanent. Some objects have cultural meaning (official example is Berlin Wall remains, semi-official example is Tsoi Wall in Moscow) and many are less-than-obvious points of interest for tourists along with museums and other traditional places.

Significance

Street art can vary greatly in shape, artistic value and longevity. Since obviously there is no point in mapping every bombing on the street, I suggest to map objects that are:

Though all of these criteria are subjective, I believe they can serve as a general "rule of thumb" for the set of tags. The freedom of deciding "to map or not to map" should be left for users to decide anyway.

Tagging

I suggest interpreting "street art" as a subset of the existing tourism=artwork category. More accurately, as artwork_type=street_art. Since "street art" is not a very descriptive term, I suggest the following tags for the key "artwork_type" (some of them already exist):

street_art - "default" type for street art objects. It's recommended to change it to one of the following:

mural - for full-wall art objects created under a single theme. Murals are unique.

graffiti - a generic term for street art painted over different objects (see significance).